lunes, 31 de diciembre de 2012

On December 30, Vladimir Bukovsky – writer, scientist, human rights campaigner, and one of the founders of the dissident movement in the USSR – will celebrate his 70th birthday. IMR Senior Policy Advisor Vladimir Kara-Murza recalls the milestones in Bukovsky’s life – and urges the present-day Russian opposition to heed his advice.

Vladimir Bukovsky does not like to be called a politician, preferring to be known as a neurophysiologist, writer or, at the very least, civic activist. In truth, he never engaged in politics: he merely realized, at an early age, that he could not reconcile himself to live quietly with a criminal and mendacious regime that sought to make millions of people its silent accomplices. Bukovsky’s protest was a moral one. “We did not play politics, we did not draft programs for the ‘people’s liberation,’” he recalls in his memoirs, To Build a Castle (a must-read for anyone interested in Russian history). “Our only weapon was glasnost (openness). Not propaganda, but glasnost, so that no one could say ‘I did not know.’ The rest is a matter for each person’s conscience.”

Finding God with Basil, Gregory, and Newman

The advantage that tragic poetry has over historical narrative seems to lie in the way individual deeds are portrayed: they are enacted.

History at its best, however, can accomplish much the same function as dramatic poetry, and John Henry Newman’s Church of the Fathersdoes just that.

The work was originally published serially in the 1830s in the pages of the British Critic, and later collated, edited, and to a degree refashioned by Newman after his conversion. The Fathers of the fourth century were to Newman models of theological seriousness and of heroic sanctity whose example promised to help the Church of England regain its apostolic character. Newman warned his reader that the Church of the Fathers contained mere “sketches,” whose “form and character” he qualified as “polemical.” Yet he was just as clearly at pains to avoid offending his reader’s sense of how a good story ought to be told as he was eager to put before them such puzzling topics as clerical celibacy and the warfare between the saints and demons. Not only would a careful telling of the story of the saints help to diffuse criticism and to discourage scoffing, it would also make the saints more available as models to imitate. Newman explained that the “frankness” that he would employ in depicting the “lingering imperfections” of the saints would “surely make us love them more, without leading us to reverence them the less, and act as a relief to the discouragement and despondency which may come over those who, in the midst of much error and sin, are always striving to imitate them.” It was in this spirit that he wrote the first four of the ten chapters which eventually made up The Church of the Fathers, on Saints Basil of Caesarea and Gregory Nazianzen.

"My old boss in Zhongnanhai (the seat of the central government) recommended Tocqueville's book, adding that a modernizing heavyweight like China cannot expect roses all the way; it should brace for a rough ride," economist Hua Sheng wrote on Tencent, the newspaper reported.

Thanks to China's top officials, French historian Alexis de Tocqueville’s “The Old Regime and the Revolution”, a 19th-century classic about the French revolution, has become a best seller in China. According to a report on Business Week [zh], after Chinese Communist Party Vice Premier Wang Qishan highly recommended this book, it sold out in many bookstores in Beijing.

Chong Ming, a history professor who studies Alexis de Tocquevilleexplained [zh]:

Many civil servants read it just to follow leaders’ interests. In China, officials have a big influence on the political culture.

Why did Chinese officials suggest this classic on the subject of revolution? Scholars started heated discussions on the Chinese social media and blogosphere.

A search of “The Old Regime and the Revolution” on Weibo yields 235,416 results, crackling with quotes from the book:

Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom, socialism restricts it. Democracy attaches all possible value to each man, socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.

Great revolutions that have happened historically, such as violent revolutions, did not occur during a time of poverty. They occurred when economic situations brought polarization to society. This is because at times like these, conflict between social classes is incited. It is easy for those in the bottom classes of the society to turn the flames of their anger into flames of war.

Some scholars think that the social background at the time of French Revolution is very similar to the conditions in today’s China.

China’s Princelings Build the Wrong Kind of Capitalism

Over the last three decades, Communist China’s leaders have lifted more than 600 million of their citizens out of poverty -- and built one of the world’s most unequal societies.

Those two outcomes didn’t have to go hand in hand. They are the result of a conscious decision by the former paramount leader Deng Xiaoping and some of his closest associates -- the so-called Eight Immortals -- to safeguard the primacy of the Communist Party by putting their families in charge of opening up China’s economy.

As Bloomberg News documents, what resulted was an enormous concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few. Examining thousands of pages of documents and conducting dozens of interviews, Bloomberg traced the holdings of the Immortals’ 103 direct descendants and their spouses.

Like any aristocracy, the families of the Eight Immortals often intertwine. Connections found by Bloomberg News include business dealings, employers in common, ties to the same private or state-owned companies and diplomatic organizations, and even an intermarriage.

Russia’s foreign minister said Saturday that Syrian President Bashar Assad has no intention of stepping down and it would be impossible to try to persuade him otherwise.

After a meeting with Lakhdar Brahimi, the U.N.’s envoy for the Syrian crisis, Sergey Lavrov also said that the Syrian opposition risks sacrificing many more lives if it continues to insist on Assad leaving office as a precondition for holding talks on Syria’s future.

Assad “has repeatedly said publicly and privately, including in his meeting with Lakhdar Brahimi in Damascus not long ago, that he does not intend to leave for anywhere, that he will stay to the end in his post, that he will, as he expressed it, defend the Syrian people, Syrian sovereignty and so forth,” Lavrov said.

sábado, 29 de diciembre de 2012

Egypt Gets a New Constitution

Egyptian voters just approved a new constitution in a popular referendum, so it’s safe to say at this point that the country has undergone a regime change. The military government installed by Gamal Abdel Nasser’s “Free Officers Movement” in 1952, which continued in a crippled form for a while after Hosni Mubarak was removed from power, is now finished.

The new constitution was translated into English and published on the Internet (1). It’s a mixed bag. Some of it is pretty good. Parts are incoherent and far too vague for a legal document. Other sections are toxic, especially Article 2 which says—and all of us knew this was coming—that “Principles of Islamic Sharia are the principal source of legislation.” [Emphasis added.]

The referendum passed by a roughly 2-1 margin, which is more or less the same percentage of people who voted for either the Muslim Brotherhood or the totalitarian Salafists in the last parliamentary election.

ABC News reports that Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi “called on the opposition to join a dialogue to heal rifts over the charter.”

There shouldn’t be any serious rifts. Not over a new constitution. It ought to be a consensus document, something liberals and conservatives, Muslims and Christians, and the secular and the religious can all live with.

Interview with Tom Peterson

On Catholics Come Home

(Video)

Tom Peterson was a successful, award-winning advertising executive for almost three decades. But in 1997, he experienced a profound conversion at a parish retreat that set him in a new direction. He applied his advertising skills to spreading the Gospel and the result was two new media apostolates.

The first is called VirtueMedia.org, which helps promote the sanctity of life through commercials, websites, and more.

The other is the one Tom is probably best known for,Catholics Come Home. Featuring high-quality television commercials and a beautiful, dynamic website, Catholics Come Home models the New Evangelization. Dioceses and parishes across the world have used their materials to draw thousands of people back to the Church.

Here's one of their more popular commercials:

Tom recently sat down with me to discuss his conversion, the Catholics Come Homeapostolate, and how we can help inactive Catholics return to the Church.

“Sola Scriptura Began in 70 AD”

by Devin Rose

I debated a Protestant scholar named Nathanael Taylor last night. You can listen to the full two hours here. In the next several posts I plan to unpack our discussion and continue with some threads that we weren’t able to pursue to completion.

I asked Nathanael when sola Scriptura “kicked in” as the sole infallible rule of faith in the early Church, and surprisingly, he answered “70 AD, with the destruction of the Jewish Temple.”

This assumes that 1) all books of the NT were completed by 70 AD and to a lesser degree that 2) the Church had come to understand and separate these twenty-seven inspired writings from the non-inspired ones.

I’m going to ignore the disputable claim made by Nathanael that the book of Daniel teaches that all books of the NT will be completed by 70 AD. I’m also going to ignore the fact that in 70 AD the canon of the NT was not crystallized in the Church’s understanding. Instead, I’m going to focus on one interesting consequence of this peculiar view, one that no Protestant I have ever talked to has believed.

1. Some Apostles still lived in 70 AD2. But sola Scriptura was now the rule3. So Christians could reject the teachings of the Apostles if they were different than their individual interpretation of the Scriptures

Some readers may think that this conclusion is (almost patently) absurd. Yet I can say with confidence that Nathanael holds to this position, because I asked the similar question later, whether he would obey Timothy as the successor of the Apostle or not. And he responded that he would only follow Timothy, bishop of Ephesus, insofar as Timothy agreed with Nathanael’s interpretation of the Scriptures.

The purpose of this essay is to elucidate the importance of Plato’s commitment to rational discourse in the Apology and Gorgias. Both dialogues chronicle the transfer of authority from the destructive world of Athens to the philosophers. The organization of politics and society, according to Plato, is determined by the orderliness of the souls of its citizens. ......................Voegelin as GuideThe Apology TransfiguredSocrates and Gorgias (Gorgias, 447-461)

The Respected OpponentThe Prospects for a Common Understanding of Experience (Pathos, 453-454)Gorgias’ Oratory and Justice (Gorgias, 455)Gorgias’ Fall: The Partial Rejection of Socratic OpennessSocrates and Polus (Gorgias, 461-481)

Polus and IdeologyThe Drift towards Relativism (468c) and the Introduction of the Measure of Pleasure and Pain (470)Socrates and Callicles (Gorgias, 481-527)Callicles and PowerQuest for OrderConclusion